Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 08 - In Dangers Path

Soon, several others had decided to band together and get the hell out with their wives and kids. There were nine other retired Yangtze sailors with Chinese wives and kids, and one with a German wife; and there were two retired Marines, one with a White Russian wife, and one, Technical Sergeant Abraham, whose Chinese wife had died, but whose mother-in-law was taking care of his three kids.

And then word of what they were planning also reached some of the soldiers who had retired from the 15th Infantry in Tientsin, and they sent a retired staff sergeant named Willis T. Cawber, Jr., to Peking to see what Brewer had in mind.

From the beginning, Doto-Si had made it clear to the others that the only way they could get out of China was through Mongolia—the Gobi Desert—and into India. That wasn't easy for them to grasp: she was the only one in the band who had ever even been to Mongolia, and most thought the Gobi Desert was miles and miles of shifting sand, like the Sahara. But eventually they came around to her way of thinking. Even though she still looked young as hell, there was something about her eyes that made others realize that she was smart and tough as hell.

Much of the Gobi was rocks and thin vegetation, she told them, not sand. That meant it could be traversed by wagon. In the summer, there was enough grass to feed sheep and goats and horses. On the other hand, water was a problem—you had to know where to find it, but it was there—and it was very, very cold at night.

There was also, Doto-Si told Brewer privately, a genuine threat from Chinese and Mongolian bandits, who robbed caravans whenever they thought they had the caravan outnumbered. That meant they would have to be armed, and prepared to fight.

That was going to be a hell of a problem, Brewer realized. Very few of the Yangtze sailors had any experience in that kind of fighting. And though soldiers from the 15th Infantry could be presumed to know how to handle weapons, he didn't know how many of them would be willing to trust their survival to the Mongolian madam of a Peking whorehouse.

But about that time he began to hear scuttlebutt in the Fouled Anchor that Sergeant James R. Sweatley and some of the other active-duty Marines in the Peking legation detachment had announced they weren't just going to raise the white flag when the war came and turn themselves in as Japanese prisoners.

The very next time—in early November 1941 —Sergeant Sweatley came into the Fouled Anchor, Chief Brewer and Technical Sergeant Abraham were waiting for him. They bought him a couple of drinks, then took him into Brewer's office to sound him out.

Brewer didn't think much of Sweatley. He was still only a buck sergeant after twenty years in the Marines, and on several occasions, he had been a troublesome drunk both in the bar and upstairs.

But Abraham argued that he was a Marine sergeant on active duty, and that meant he would be in a position to get weapons, which the others didn't have and damned sure were going to need. On top of that, he and the other Marines he'd bring with him were young. A good thing, under the circumstances—especially considering some of the others who would be going into the Gobi.

«What we say here goes no further,» Brewer began.

«What we say about what?»

Technical Sergeant Abraham decided to cut through the bullshit. «The scuttlebutt is that you and some of the other Marines are not going to surrender to the Japanese when this war starts. Is that true, or are you just running your mouth?»

«Who said I said something like that?»

«Two of the Marines who say you're taking them with you,» Abraham told him, and furnished their names.

Who else

, Sergeant Sweatley wondered,

have those bastards been running their mouth to

?

Then he said the thought aloud.

«As far as I know, nobody else,» Abraham replied. «I had a little talk with them. Told them if any of their officers, or even some of their noncoms, heard them, they'd be confined until it was time to surrender.»

«What do you want, you and Brewer?»

«The same thing you do, to stay out of a Jap POW enclosure. To get the hell out of China, into India, or maybe even Russia.»

«Yeah?»

«And to take our families with us,» Brewer added.

Sweatley knew about Brewer's family. And he knew about Abraham. He had three kids with his Chinese woman, and then she'd up and died on him, and he had stayed in China because of the kids, to take care of them.

«If I was planning something like that, and I'm not saying I am, what I would do is head for India,» Sweatley said. «On horseback. Traveling fast and light across the Altai Mountains into the Gobi Desert and then across it.»

Jesus

, Chief Brewer thought,

that makes him the second person

—

Doto-Si being the first

—

who understands that the only way to get out of China is through the Gobi Desert

.

«Ride horses across sand dunes?» Brewer countered sarcastically.

«Let me tell you something, Chief. The Gobi is mostly rocks, not sand. If you had a car and enough gas, you could drive across the sonofabitch.»

«Then why don't you just drive across it?»

«I thought about it. And did the numbers. For one thing, there's no way I couldcarry that much gas. for another, trucks would be conspicuous. That's the last thing I can afford.»

«You really think a dozen or more Marines on horseback wouldn't be conspicuous?» Abraham asked.

«Meaning what?»

«Meaning you'd be white men in Mongolia.»

«I'll worry about that later. If, I mean, I was thinking about something like this.»

«I've been thinking along the same lines,» Brewer said. «My wife and me, and some other people. My wife is a Mongolian. She knows all about the Gobi Desert.»

«No shit?»

«We're thinking of crossing it in horse-drawn, rubber-tired wagons,» Abraham said.

They were doing more than thinking about it: Three days before, Brewer had sent Doto-Si to Peking in the Oldsmobile, with the kids and one of the bouncers, to go to Baotou to buy wagons.

«And you don't think you're going to stand out as a white man in Mongolia?»

«I've got a Nansen passport,» Brewer said. «It's phony, but I can't tell the difference between it and a real one. I can pass myself off as a White Russian.»

«Uh.»

Brewer's smarter than I thought

, Sweatley thought. I

didn't even think about getting a phony Nansen passport

.

«And I got a Mongolian wife and kids,» Brewer went on. «If I stay in the wagon and let her do the talking, I might not even have to show anybody my Nansen passport.»

«So what do you want from me?» Sweatley asked.

Brewer looked at Abraham, who nodded. Then Brewer took the chance and told Sweatley. «There's ten Yangtze sailors, including me, who stayed here when we went into the Fleet Reserve. All of us are married. Mostly to Chinese, but there's a German wife, and a White Russian. There's two Marines, Abraham and a guy named Brugemann, who used to be the finance sergeant in the Fourth. And, all told, twenty kids. I have also been talking to some soldiers who took their retirement here. There's maybe six, seven of them in Tientsin.»

«Like I said, what do you want from me?»

«We could be useful to each other,» Brewer said.

«You tell me, Sergeant Abraham, how is—what did you say, twelve?—twelve wives and twenty kids going to help me get to India.»

«You know how to navigate?» Chief Brewer asked.

«I know what a compass is,» Sweatley said.

«A compass won't be much help in the middle of the Gobi Desert,» Abraham said. «There's only a few roads, and the Japs will be watching them. You're goingto have to cross the gobi desert the same way you cross an ocean, by celestial navigation, by the stars.»